Tag Archives: Gas Powered Games

A few days ago it was revealed that Chris Taylor, the owner of Gas Powered Games, had decided to cancel the Kickstarter campaign for their ARPG/RTS hybrid Wildman. At the same time, it was mentioned that he had been exploring other avenues to find a way to keep Gas Powered Games open. Looks like one of those other avenues led to Wargaming.net’s front door.

The company behind online war games World of Tanks and World of Warplanes has just announced that they have acquired Gas Powered Games. This adds IPs like Dungeon Siege, Demigod and Supreme Commander to Wargaming.net’s list of titles.

This is the third studio acquisition that Wargaming.net has made within a year. The company’s rapid growth was something that Taylor acknowledged: “Wargaming’s growth in recent years has been tremendous, and we’re looking forward to joining one of the fastest growing gaming companies in the world.” As for what this all means for the ill-fated Wildman (which was beginning to look really cool) is yet to be made clear.

Gas Powered Games owner Chris Taylor has announced the cancellation of their Wildman Kickstarter campaign. Wildman was set to be an ARPG-RTS hybrid game from a team with some serious experience in making games in both of those genres.

The Wildman Kickstarter began experiencing issues within the first few days of launching. Chris Taylor laid-off nearly the entire Gas Powered Games staff and crew in a drastic attempt to keep the company from closing. The intention was to keep the Wildman Kickstarter running, fund the game and then hire those people back.

Now, with less than a week until the Kickstarter campaign was due to end, Taylor has cancelled everything. The campaign managed to accumulate less than half of what was requested: $504, 120.00 out of $1.1 million.

The development team behind titles like Supreme Commander, Dungeon Siege and Total Annihilation has a new game in the works. Called Wildman, the new title is a blend of real-time strategy with action role-playing elements. In other words: it’s a hybrid game made by a team that has thorough experience in crafting some amazing RTS and ARPG experiences. A Kickstarter campaign launched a week ago, but less than four days after that, Gas Powered Games’ founder and owner Chris Taylor let go of almost the entire staff contingent working on the project.

Forty people have been shown the door, leaving Taylor and about two other staff members behind at Gas Powered Games. Shortly after this news hit, Taylor hopped onto Kickstarter to explain what was going on via a teary-eyed video update. In that video, Taylor said: “If I ran this team through the entire Kickstarter campaign, and it fails to fund, then I have to let everyone go, shut the company down and not give any PTO [paid time-off] or severance, or anything.”

Gas Powered Games is the development team that brought us titles like Dungeon Siege, Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation. They’ve been pretty quiet since Age of Empires Online, but their website has lit up with a sparkly new count-down clock for something “wild”. Speculation hats on, people!